HOME  E-DEMOCRACY 98  E-DEBATE WEB MN-FORUM

Thomas Fiske      Response 9

Question 9: Describe briefly what you feel is the greatest challenge facing Minnesota farmers right now. Outside of lobbying the federal government for support, specifically describe three actions, programs, or laws that you would support as governor to meet the farm crisis. If your programs involve new state expenditures, how would you pay for them?

The biggest overriding problem for Minnesota farmers is that
farmers receive far less for selling their commodities on the
market than is needed to meet the costs of production and make
an adequate living for their families. For this reason
conditions are getting worse and thousands are being driven out
of farming every year.

The root cause of this crisis is the driving down of farm
commodity prices by the big agribusiness monopolies over the
previous decades. For their inputs and their crops working
farmers are price takers. It is the big banks and agribusiness
monopolies who are price makers. Big companies like Monsanto,
Ralson Purina, Cargill, John Deere and Land-of-Lakes dictate the
prices on everything from seed, fertilizer, tractors to the
final product of the family farmer. This exploitation of the
working farmer by the agribusiness monopolies and banks has an
especially obvious aspect in today's times.

There are a number of measures that I believe should be adopted
immediately to help protect farmers from the ravages of the
disasters that are engulfing them.

First, the federal government should declare a moratorium on all
farm foreclosures.

Second, all working farmers should be guaranteed disaster relief
sufficient to compensate for the full loss of crops, livestock, lands,
and buildings. This should also include farmers whose contracts with
processors are arbitrarily torn up, like the poultry growers in
southern Minnesota who were stuck with owing loans on massive
investment in buildings and chickens when Campbell's closed down a
processing plant in Worthington.

Third, farmers costs could be greatly reduced if the government
provides low-interest credit, with preference given to those
with the greatest need.

Fourth, reducing taxes farmers pay could further slash costs.
Real estate taxes, based on acreage held, rather than on income
is especially burdensome. The only tax should be a sharply
graduated income tax on the wealthy.

Fifth, the government should guarantee farmers a market and
income for the products of their labor to meet their production
costs and have a decent living.

Sixth, watch-dog committees of farmers, unionists and consumer
groups should be established to counter the attempt of big
business to drive a wedge between farmers and wage-workers to
asserting that farmers demands for a living income will drive up
grocery store prices.

These programs can be paid for by the vast sums of surplus
wealth created by workers and farmers which today are
appropriated by the rich. Such, for example, is the $300
billion per year in interest payments to the wealthy in the
federal budget.

Through solidarity and united action among working farmers a
powerful movement to fight for farmers can be built. And when
collaboration between fighting farmers and militant workers who
are beginning to resist worsening conditions starts to be
established the foundations will be laid for those who toil on
the land and in the factories to conduct a struggle to replace
the government of big business with a government of workers and
farmers.